"An Escapade," which appeared in the 24 November 1928 issue of The New Yorker, is one of the first stories Callaghan published in the magazine. In late 1928, Callaghan wrote to Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner's, asking for advice: "Do you think The New
Yorker would be a good magazine for my stories?" he asked. "They have never printed
fiction before," he continued, "but are going to start with the story of mine called 'The Escapade'" (qtd. in B. Callaghan ix). The editor Katharine Angell38 had written to Callaghan on 23 October 1928 asking him to submit to the magazine:
We have read with much interest and pleasure your stories in Scribner's, and we wonder if by any chance you have on hand any short sketches ( from 1000 to 15000words) which you would care to let us see.
We do not necessarily,you know, publish only "funny" stuff, but we do like a great deal such vivid character sketches as you do, although they must of
37
These characteristics and thematic concerns include: ambiguity; alienation and the failure of
communication; deliberate inaccessibility in order to divide "high" culture from "low" culture; epiphanic endings; and formal experimentation.
38
Angell would later become Katharine White when she married E.B. White in 1929. Throughout this chapter, I refer to her as Katharine Angell when referring to letters she wrote before her marriage, and Katharine White when referring to letters she wrote after her marriage.
course be pretty short , compared with the usual length of stories in the monthlies. What is too short for most magazines if often just the right length for us.
With hopes then that you may have something for us, Sincerely yours,
THE NEW YORKER
"An Escapade" is a story about a woman who goes to a theatre to hear the Reverend John Simpson speak after leading her husband to believe she is on her way to their usual cathedral to hear Father Conley speak. Inside the theatre, she has an uncomfortable encounter with a crying man. The story appears in a very different version in Barry Callaghan's collection than it did in the magazine in 1928. Most of the changes the Callaghans made to the story were cuts, especially to sections that clarified its events or gave the reader insight into the protagonist Rose Carey's motives and character.
In the version published in The New Yorker, Mrs. Carey stands outside of the theatre, gathering the courage to enter:
She walked with dignity, bothered by her own shyness, and thinking of her husband asking if Father Conley was speaking tonight in the Cathedral. She didn't want to think of Father Conley, or at least she didn't want to compare him with Mr. Simpson, who was simply interesting because all her bridge friends were talking about him. It was altogether different about Father Conley.
She was under the theatre lights, turning in, and someone said to her: "This way, lady, step this way, right along now." (22)
In the version that Barry Callaghan published, this scene is considerably shorter: "Bothered by her own shyness, she remembered that her husband had asked if Father Conley was speaking tonight in the Cathedral. Under the theatre lights someone said to her: 'This way, lady. Step this way, right along now'" (35). In this shortened version, the Callaghans have removed the explanation for Mrs. Carey's motive for sneaking out to hear Reverend Simpson as well as the more detailed description of her movements. The
reader is left to speculate about the reason for her interest in Reverend Simpson, and expected to make the reasonable inference that, since she is under the theatre lights, she is about to enter the theatre. This shortened version is not only more succinct and terse, it is also slightly more enigmatic; it offers the reader a story whose meaning is more
indeterminate and ambiguous because it does not spell out the protagonists' motivation for going to hear the Reverend speak, and allows more room for readers to make meaning out of the text for themselves by leaving small gaps between descriptions of Mrs. Carey's actions which the reader must fill.
In her surveys of modernism and the Canadian short story, Reingard M. Nischik identifies "ambiguity, allusion, ellipsis" as well as "narrative economy, [and] stylistic succinctness" as "modernist strategies" ("The Canadian Short Story" 7 and "The Modernist English-Canadian Short Story" 195). In its increased economy, Barry Callaghan's version of "An Escapade" more closely conforms to literary critics'
conceptions of the modernist aesthetic than the version of the story that The New Yorker
published during the modernist period does. These differences demonstrate both Barry Callaghan's desire to associate his father's work with that of other canonical modernists, as well The New Yorker's hostility to modernism through its parochial editorial policies and practices concerning both setting and subject matter and the aesthetic or stylistic elements of the work it published.
Where the New Yorker version clarifies Mrs. Carey's thoughts and motives, Barry Callaghan's version makes Mrs. Carey's character more opaque, thus making the
connections between the events in the story less obvious, and forcing readers to perform more of the interpretive work themselves. As Gary Boire's obituary for Callaghan makes clear, this shifting of the work of meaning making onto the shoulders of the reader was deliberate and characteristic of Callaghan's style. Boire claims that, in addition to "a pared down style," Callaghan's work was also marked by "the meticulous rhetorical construction of an elusive ambiguity of plot, language, and structure which forces individual readers to 'see the world through their own eyes' . . . his writing always strove deliberately for a "haiku effect," because 'it's always completed by the reader inside their own mind'" (Boire, "Morley Callaghan 1903-1990" 209).
Faye Hammill and Karen Leick argue that, unlike its competitor Vanity Fair, "The
New Yorker did not cultivate relationships with modernist writers" because it did not
"wis[h] to be considered difficult, academic, or inaccessible" (185). While "the New
Yorker was knowledgeable about [the most experimental] modernist writers, so familiar
with these writers that it could laugh at them and even with them, it was never a home to them" (190). In contrast to the modernist espousal of newness and difficulty for its own sake, The New Yorker, and Harold Ross in particular, were well known for an obsession with clarity. In 1949, White wrote to the poet Elizabeth Bishop, explaining a query: "You know one of Mr. Ross's fetishes is that he understand every poem we publish.
Sometimes we've published ones he doesn't understand but we try to make clarity an aim even so which is why I'm bothering you" (qtd. in Bielle 39-40). As Hammill and Leick point out, citing Thomas Kunkel's work in support of their argument about the magazine's resistance to experimental modernism, Gertrude Stein received a letter from White – addressed to Alice B. Toklas – indicating the same policy; Stein's submission was rejected because White "was not allowed to buy anything her boss didn't understand" (187). Barry Callaghan's The New Yorker Stories reflect the competing desires to canonize Morley Callaghan as a modernist and to profit off of the association with the anti-modernist New Yorker.
In the New Yorker Stories version of "An Escapade," the Callaghans remove some of the qualifiers and clarifiers that are so characteristic of New Yorker fiction. For
example, the man whom Mrs. Carey meets outside the theatre, and who takes off his hat to greet her, must first be described as wearing a hat in order to have one to remove. In the version that the Callaghans published, the fact that "the man had on a derby" (New
Yorker 22) is not included, and readers must take it on faith that, when they are told that
the man removed his hat, he must have been wearing one to begin with. Inside the
theatre, the man Mrs. Carey met outside sits down beside her. The New Yorker version of the story tells us "She was annoyed because she knew she was too definitely aware of him sitting beside her" (22, my emphasis). The version published in the collected New
Yorker Stories is not only more succinct, but also, through the omission of the word
"because," does not spell out the reason for Mrs. Carey's annoyance quite so obviously: "She was annoyed, she knew she was too aware of his closeness" (35). The use of a
comma instead of the conjunction "because" opens up ambiguity; it is possible that Mrs. Carey is annoyed either by the fact that the man has sat down beside her, or by her own awareness of his closeness.
Barry and Morley Callaghan's cutting of descriptions, transitions, and
conjunctions in "The Escapade" and other stories included in The New Yorker Stories has the effect of making Callaghan's early work appear to adhere even more closely to critics' descriptions of Callaghan's laconic,39 simplistic style, and the modernist aesthetic. In
That Summer In Paris, Callaghan himself relates what, in hindsight, he conceived of as
his goal in writing: to "strip the language, and make the style, the method, all the
psychological ramifications, the ambience of the relationships, all one thing, so the reader couldn't make separations" (148). The revisions present a version of Callaghan's
modernism as current critics describe Callaghan and modernism. They function to reinforce Callaghan's ties to modernism as a recognizable (if retroactively imposed) stylistic phenomenon, and the symbolic value inherent in the work of canonical authors associated with the cosmopolitan modernist movement (Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, and Pound). Callaghan attempts to derive recognition for his father's work by connecting it to the prestige a non-specialist readership associates with modernism in general rather than with a specific movement or strain of modernism.
While the revised version of "An Escapade" simplifies Callaghan's syntax, it does not simplify the motives of the protagonist. Rather, the changes the Callaghans made have the effect of increasing the ambiguity surrounding Mrs. Carey's actions and their motives. Adrian Hunter describes "plotless," modernist short stories such as Katherine Mansfield's "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" as "willfully enigmatic" (44), and examples of "modernism's valorization of difficulty" (48). Hunter continues:
39
Writes Nischik: "Further trademarks of his narrative style are the ironic narrative voice, the ambiguity of plot and language, and, above all, the laconic diction, which has time and again spurred associations with Ernest Hemingway. Particularly in his early work, Callaghan's vocabulary and syntax create a deceptively simple and direct, deliberately repetitive, unadorned style" ("The Canadian Short Story" 9).
Although we may be more accustomed to thinking of difficulty, in the modernist text at least, as the product of multiplicity, superabundance and allusive excess, it was also recognized that obscurity could be generated through radically curtailed or laconic modes of expression where these broke down the logical connections in narrative and semantic sequence. (48)
In the revised version of "An Escapade," the Callaghans increase obscurity or opacity in the story by curtailing readers' access to the protagonist's thoughts. In The New Yorker's version of the story, a third-person, omniscient narrator describes Mrs. Carey's thoughts once she notices the man beside her is crying: "She tried to adjust her thoughts so the man's misery would belong to a pattern of Sunday service in a theatre, and did not glance at him again till she realized that his elbow was on the arm of her seat, supporting his chin, while he blinked his eyes and slowly moved his head" (23). In the story as published by Barry Callaghan, we are granted more limited access to the protagonists' thoughts; they are the kinds of thoughts an observant third-person narrator could infer based on Mrs. Carey's actions, movements, and facial expressions rather than a description of attempts to control her thinking that only Mrs. Carey or an omniscient narrator could know about: "She did not glance at him again till she realized that his elbow was on the arm of her seat, supporting his chin, while he blinked and moved his head" (33). Throughout the later version, the reader is required to make connections, inferences and assumptions that are not required of readers of the New Yorker version of the story.
These changes function as part of Barry Callaghan's larger attempt to tap into the cultural capital of both the modernist canon and The New Yorker in order to increase Callaghan's cultural capital through association. In Contingencies of Value, Herrnstein Smith theorizes the evaluation of "great literature" and the shifting purposes it fulfills over time. She writes:
The recommendation of value represented by the repeated inclusion of a
particular work in anthologies of "great poetry" not only promotes but goes some distance toward creating the value of that work, as does is repeated appearance on
reading lists or its frequent citation or quotation by professors, scholars, critics, poets, and other elders of the tribe; (10)
Callaghan's work has fallen out of favour in university classrooms, and is not often included on the syllabi of courses in modernism, which tend to focus on American or British and Irish writers, nor is he often included in survey courses on Canadian literature.40 Barry Callaghan's Preface to The New Yorker Stories attempts to create a place for Callaghan at the centre of the modernist canon, particularly among the primarily American writers who expatriated to Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, through association with canonical modernists, and allusions to Callaghan's superiority to these writers. The Preface begins:
It was 1928. Morley Callaghan had published a story in Ezra Pound's little magazine, The Exile, and he had appeared in transition with James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. He'd had a story in the Paris magazine, This Quarter, and so had Hemingway, and Hemingway had written to the editor, saying, "Of the two I would much rather have written the story by Morley Callaghan . . . Oh Christ, I want to write so well [. . .] Callaghan's story is as good as Dubliners." (ix) The Preface continues this canonical name-dropping: "Morley went to Paris, settled in near the city prison, had supper with Joyce, drove to Chartres with Hemingway and watched F. Scott Fitzgerald stand on his head" (x), and "William Carlos Williams had him to his house for supper and told him that he had found the effect of Strange Fugitive
so stark it had kept him awake all night" (ix). The Preface implies that since Callaghan's work has been consecrated by the consecrated authors of American modernism, it too deserves canonical status. As Herrnstein Smith argues,
40
Norman Snider's 25 October 2008 Globe and Mail article indicates that "Callaghan's reputation is in the midst of a revival." This statement suggests that Callaghan's literary star had shone less brightly before the 2008 publication of The New Yorker Stories and A Literary Life: Reflections and Reminiscences. As Snider states, Morley Callaghan "knows how reputations are made, how they fade . . . He himself is fortunate to have had Barry Callaghan, his son, a writer, publisher and talented editor, to keep his books before the public."
What is commonly referred to as "the test of time" . . . is not, as the figure implies, an impersonal and impartial mechanism; for the cultural institutions through which it operates . . . are, of course, all managed by persons [and] . . . the texts that are selected and preserved by "time" will always tend to be those which "fit" (and, indeed, have often been designed to fit) their characteristics, needs, interests, resources, and purposes. (51)
In this case, Barry Callaghan uses his access to the cultural institution of publishing house Exile Editions in order to meet his own need: reestablishing his father's work's place in the modernist canon.
Barry Callaghan's collection clearly also attempts to acquire symbolic capital for his father's work by appealing to its association with The New Yorker. Although this was not the case when Harold Ross first began publishing The New Yorker, the magazine has at times been considered by readers, and by contributors such as Mavis Gallant, to be "the best magazine in the world" (Gallant 32). In drawing readers' attention to Callaghan's association with the magazine by entitling this collection The New Yorker Stories, Barry Callaghan participates in what Ben Yagoda describes as a tradition of appealing to the notion of "upscale urbanity" that the magazine, and association with it, connotes, in order to sell products (13).41 Nowhere in the Preface or Editor's Note does Barry Callaghan draw attention to the changes made to these New Yorker stories; instead he leads readers to believe that what they hold in their hands is a reproduction of stories as they appeared in the magazine. These are not historical texts, but rather updated versions of the stories revised in collaboration between Barry and Morley Callaghan at the end of Morley's career. These versions are designed to appeal to a contemporary readership and meet their expectations of modernist style. As I argue in my discussion of the changes made to the story "Timothy Harshaw's Flute," they are also designed to sanitize some of the racial prejudices of the modernist period that are likely to make a contemporary readership
41
Other examples Yagoda cites include using the recognizable typeface Rea Irvin designed for the New Yorker's headlines and mastheads in everything from advertisements for cars to the covers of books such as the cover of Alice Munro's collection of stories, The Moons of Jupiter (13).
uncomfortable. Drawing readers' attention to these changes, however, would risk
weakening the collection's association with the elegance, sophistication, and tradition of the magazine that the title The New Yorker Stories evokes.